Zanzibar for Obama

Since the last time I wrote, I've embarked on a 40-hour train ride (in which I learned the kiSwahili phrases for both "My name is not Mzungu!" and "No, thank you." Useful.), briefly peaked at Lake Victoria (fishy), took a 15 hour landrover ride across the Serengeti and Ngorogoro conservation area (Big. And dusty), spent a day chilling in a Masai village, and managed a brief but eminently satisfying view of Mt. Kilimanjaro, snows and all. Wow. It's outrageous just to read that sentence, isn't it? Sometimes I take a second to reflect on all the places I've been, and people I've met in the last couple of months, and I find myself simply flabbergasted. It is unbelievable that I have had the good luck to experience a trip like this, and I try to spend at least a minute or two each day feeling greatful for it. To be fair, this is usually not the minute when some street-vendor or other has started up with a combination of 'flirting' and selling me something I don't want. Occasionally he will throw in a reference to how fat I am and how attractive African men find this. At this point I usually throw the concept of cultural-sensitivity out and respond exactly as I please:
"Big mama! How are you today! Nice t-shirts, good price!" (while puffing out his cheeks and miming a big stomach. Or, occasionally, making eating motions. My favorite.)
"Hey, Fuck you! I'm great, no thanks." I talk fast and say it all with a big smile. You can get away with anything with a big smile. I doubt they even hear me.

A lot of this has been going on recently, since a few days after my brief view of Mt. Kilimanjaro (how much longer is the snow there supposed to last, anyways?) I made my way to Zanzibar. Which is FANTASTIC. I hesitate to label any place I've been as a favorite, I feel like everything should be evaluated in its own time and place and context and, I've loved almost everywhere. But despite the almost obscene amount of tourists wandering the island, and the obscenely irritating number of shops, street-vendors, and people generally trying to make a buck that the tourists have generated, Zanzibar -- and Stone Town, where I am now -- is still amazing. Zanzibar is the center of a swirl of every culture, language, religion, and individual quirk that has ever seemingly wandered across the African continent. Hindu temples and shops, Omani mosques, a Portugese fort, remnants of hundreds of different southern, central, and African tribes -- come as either willing traders or as slaves to be sold in the last slave market in Africa -- all shape the place and the language and the food and the smells. I just don't have words for it.
And its hard to mind the tourists in that case, because in a place where cultures and people from across the world have ebbed and flowed for over 1,000 years, it makes perfect sense that toddlers now shout "Ciao!" as well as "Jambo!," that restaurants ease Swahili food for European mouths, and the sheer amount of energy and infrastructure that goes into, well...international trade, I suppose you could say. (Even put into this context, however, the man who has been trying to sell me bootleg swahili reggae CDs for the past 3 days still irritates the living crap out of me). So I love it. Zanzibar is the home of intersections, of contrasts, of blending and bending and history and modern crap. The last slave market in Africa is now the home of "Zanzibar for Obama!" election headquarters.